and I think there are other options if you contact someone at your local Microsoft office.
I've just started using BizSpark (for a side project with 2 friends, so the "startup" term is a bit loose), and it's a great program.
It's still way too expensive, but their goal is to let you give it a try, and if your startup is doing well you won't mind paying U$ 10.000 or whatever if you're cashing millions :)
On the other hand you do have companies that do make millions that are bailing on certain aspects of Microsoft tools and servers due licensing costs and increases. I've been involved in IT budgeting for almost two decades and the CFOs don't always sign the check just because it's an IBM/Microsoft/Oracle solution.
Ultimately, when it comes to business, one of the biggest reasons to spend money is to buy yourself time. You probably could build an entire product yourself, but if you hired a few developers at $100K/year, you could build the product way faster. If you had new systems at $3K each (instead of buying used laptops from five years ago for $99 each), development would speed up. If you spent $2K/year on a third-party software suite, you wouldn't need to build it yourself or mess around with something not quite so polished. The flip side is that if spending money on something doesn't get you any benefit then of course you shouldn't do it.
Some people see benefits, and some don't. But making comparisons to narcotics comes across as quite childish.
Cost of Visual Studio Pro + MSDN for my (small) business was £1100. This for 2 years of MSDN, and it was some deal (at the reseller's suggestion) that also came with various Windows licences too. (More Windows 7 than I imagined was likely for the price, and I think Windows XP and Windows Server 2008 R2 too.) Renewal cost is something like £900.
I wouldn't refuse something cheaper, but the price seemed fair enough as these things go. For a side project this is perhaps a little steep, and if you could realistically use something cheaper you would be silly not to, but for a business with an actual need for all this Microsoft junk this seems like reasonable value.
Stuff that costs me less than £~500/yr: printer paper.
Stuff that costs me more than £~500/yr: everything else.
Then again, just to back up your point - my last employer switched everybody from MS Office to OpenOffice to avoid the licensing fees, even though numerous internal tools (that then had to be rewritten, at a cost of several man-weeks, plus drag due to changes in workflow for the less technical staff that used them) relied on VBA, COM and OLE stuff that OpenOffice didn't support. And the place I'm currently working with doesn't install Visual Studio on the servers (each server = 6-core Core i7 with 32GB RAM, 2TB RAID1, 1TB SSD) because apparently it would be too costly to do that. So maybe once you become big enough for MS to care about things start to become rather more expensive.
I tried making the software cost for my side projects $0, and the non-Microsoft community does make it feasible, but I'm way too invested in Microsoft tools, so the productivity hit was way too steep.
I started with a stack of Grails + PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, etc.), it worked pretty nicely (I was particularly impressed with the ease of use of Elastic Beanstalk for an absolute newbie).
What I need is some free time, or a job switch (working on the 2nd part :) ).
Still, I tried most IDEs and other ways of development (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Sublime Text), and I still like Visual Studio the most. I also like Microsoft SQL Server a lot.
The Microsoft stack is certainly a lot more expensive than an equivalent stack if you have to pay for it, but having the BizSpark option, it makes a lot of sense if you come from a Microsoft background.
I've never been in the situation to make these kinds of decisions, but when you're paying tens of thousands a year per developer, sysadmin, qa, and/or ops people, a couple thousands per in software costs isn't going to break the bank.
- BizSpark for startups( http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/ )
- DreamSpark for students ( https://www.dreamspark.com/ )
and I think there are other options if you contact someone at your local Microsoft office.
I've just started using BizSpark (for a side project with 2 friends, so the "startup" term is a bit loose), and it's a great program.
It's still way too expensive, but their goal is to let you give it a try, and if your startup is doing well you won't mind paying U$ 10.000 or whatever if you're cashing millions :)